Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,926

This is the grave of William Mattox.

OK…..this one requires some context for a horrible human being. When you walk through a cemetery, especially in the South, you wonder about all these people and what they did and whether they are culpable for any of our many, many, many horrifying national tragedies. Some of them, of course. But who? This is doubly on my mind in the South. After all, there are all these dudes who were Confederate veterans. Naturally, we focus on leading Confederate officers and politicians. I’ve done a lot of these assholes in this series. But what about the lower level soldier, say, in this case a second lieutenant?

Well, I’d have no way of knowing who William Mattox is without another historian doing the work for me. I would also have just figured this person was too obscure to find or know anything about it without the historians. But back in 2020, I read Talitha LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South. This is a great history, if hard to read because of the subject matter. And LeFlouria not only talked about Mattox but also found his grave. So I figured that if I was ever in this part of Georgia, I would visit the grave myself and talk about the horrible outrages conducted by this absolute scumbag, a person for whom I will say nothing remotely positive.

William Mattox ran a prison camp for Black women in north Georgia. He was born in 1836 into the slavery elite. He was the youngest child of a bigtime slave master and was raised to be that himself. He went to the University of Georgia and his father carefully trained him on how to handle slaves, which was to beat them and commit whatever violence you wanted against them. By the time Mattox was 23, he owned 78 slaves and over 1,000 acres of prime cotton land. But with the end of the war, not only did Mattox lose his human property, he left plantation agriculture entirely. As you can see from the grave, he served in the Confederate army, though not in any kind of exceptional way and I don’t know anything about his military career.

Rather, in 1865. Mattox decided to embrace the industrial capitalist vision of the North and find a space for himself in that world. He opened a grist mill and bought a bunch of land that he would use for paid labor, as much as he didn’t like it. He was successful and reestablished himself as an important local figure. He came to know the New South promoter and Atlanta newspaper publisher Henry Grady. Mattox thought Grady’s idea of white supremacist industrialization was great. He started opening textile mills, which became the foundation of New South prosperity. Not for the workers of course, they were treated like trash, even the white ones. But for rich men, this was the new way to establish yourself in the economy. But three months after his initial mill opened, it was struck by lightning. Mattox lost just about everything.

But he was a connected guy. Mattox was hardly headed toward poverty. Rather, he figured out a new way to have cheap labor for his industrial ventures–prison labor. He bought a prison plantation. See, in the post-Civil War years, the states did not have the money to actually run their own prisons. Plus their leaders were enthralled with the new economic development. So when someone was sent to prison, they were really sent to a private prison camp. It took about 5 seconds to realize that you could round up Black people, figure out some “crime” to say they did, and then get their labor for free again. So this became common through the South and this is how Mattox would build a new empire.

Mattox opened Camp Heardmont in 1892. This would be a camp strictly for women prisoners. He started with 66 women, 64 of which were Black. This was on his personal plantation land. Mattox treated the prisoners like slaves. The prison quarters were designed like old slave quarters and he personally slept in the big house next to it to keep track of everything at all times. Mattox framed all this in terms of his personal beneficent nature in “reforming” these women by banning alcohol and all the other typical moral language. But he just reinstituted slavery in all but name. Mattox believed that Black women were capable of herculean labors because that’s what they were good for, so he routinely overworked these women. They did a lot of logging, which is one of the hardest jobs that existed for men, not to mention women. So lots of women were maimed or killed. The few white women at his plantation camp of course received easier work.

When women came into the camp pregnant, he would do nothing for their children. They usually died quickly and their bodies tossed aside. Then the women were immediately put to work in the forest or sawmill. Women did escape pretty frequently. They were usually caught and whipped or beaten. Rape was common and so were the children from those rapes. The fathers were Mattox’s prison guards. Mattox didn’t care. He didn’t care if they were pregnant or had just given birth. This wasn’t slavery. He had no incentive to keep those children alive.

Mattox actually claimed he was a humane guy who didn’t beat the women and that he learned that the nicer he treated them, the less likely they were to run away. Maybe that was true and things did change over time. But the children of the surrounding area actually sang songs about how Mattox was the meanest man around. We know this because he himself talked about it with some bemusement.

In any case, the Panic of 1893 lowered cotton prices and started to make Mattox’s prison plantation unprofitable. It closed in 1899, with the state founding its own prison farm, which wasn’t any better than what Mattox was doing.

In 1901, Mattox died when his son-in-law shot him over a stolen horse. It was a duel, in case you thought these evil idiots weren’t still living their pre-Civil War desires.

William Mattox is in Elmhurst Cemetery, Elberton, Georgia.

If you would like this series to visit other people associated with the horrors of the post-Civil War southern outsourced prison system, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Buchanan, who was the governor of Tennessee who defended prison camps in the 1890s, is in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Julia Strudwick Tutwiler, who was a reformer in the early twentieth century around these issues, is in Havana, Alabama. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.